Everything’s coming up lilacs for Springfield Choral Society

Thursday

Apr 30, 2009 at 12:01 AMApr 30, 2009 at 7:00 AM

On Monday evening, members of the Springfield Choral Society gathered in Westminster Presbyterian Church for one of the last rehearsals before their spring concerts, set for this weekend. Amid a program of hymns and spirituals, the singers are preparing for the world premiere of “Lilacs,” a work the society commissioned from composer Carol Barnett.

Brian Mackey

On Monday evening, members of the Springfield Choral Society gathered in Westminster Presbyterian Church for one of the last rehearsals before their spring concerts, set for this weekend.

The sanctuary is spare, with hard wooden pews and few decorations. The sound of a heavy rain cascades against the roof, and the place has the strange, empty feeling that comes with seeing stained-glass windows darkened by the night.

Amid a program of hymns and spirituals, the singers are preparing for the world premiere of “Lilacs,” a work the society commissioned from composer Carol Barnett.

“This is a big deal. This piece is a big deal,” SCS music director Marion van der Loo said during a break in the rehearsal. “It’s a big deal for a community this size to get a commissioned piece from somebody so prominent.”

“Lilacs” takes its title and text from the Walt Whitman poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

“O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring; / Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west, / And thought of him I love,” Whitman wrote. The poem is in part about the spring 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Barnett said she spent a lot of time with the text before writing any music.

“I love working with texts because it give us, as composers, all sorts of ideas about where to go,” Barnett said in a recent telephone interview.

“I really believe that the process of listening to music — music itself — is a nostalgia-based language. You hear a piece of music and immediately your mind starts thinking, on some sort of sub-conscious level, ‘Where have I heard that sort of thing before, and what did I feel like when I heard it?’”

That, Barnett said, is how couples can say they have “our song,” or people think of the 1970s when they hear a song they were listening to during that time.

“That works really well for us composers because we pick out emotions and things that we want to bring out in the text,” Barnett said.

That’s why she spends so much time working with the text, often to the point of memorizing it before writing a single note.

When she begins to write, Barnett uses a pencil and paper and a keyboard to check notes.
Van der Loo called the piece rhythmically intricate, with men’s and women’s voices interlocking in ways that musically illustrate the poem.

“You really have to hear the music and think about the text,” van der Loo said.

“Lilacs” lasts about five minutes and 30 seconds, but the society had only commissioned a four-minute piece. That could have been problematic because Barnett charges $1,000 for each “finished minute” of music she writes.

But Barnett kept to the four minute agreement and included the extra music gratis.

Van der Loo, joked, however, that she was prepared to drive a hard bargain: “I said to the board, ‘If she tried to charge us (for the extra 90 seconds), we’re just going to stop singing at four minutes.’”

Brian Mackey can be reached at (217) 747-9587 or brian.mackey@sj-r.com.